Iraq, Oil and Barack Obama

Who made the following statement today:

Mr. Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. . . [Afghanistan's] strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

(A) John McCain
(B) Dick Cheney
(C) The lead Washington Post editorial in today's paper

If you chose (C), you win an all expenses paid vacation to the Green Zone, and four more years in Iraq.

In his brief trip through the Middle East, Sen. Obama succeeded in getting the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on record as supporting the eventual pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, whether it's in 16 months (Obama) or two years (al-Maliki). And he put the advice of Gen. David H. Petraeus, President Bush's appointee, and the other local commanders in its proper context: "I'm factoring in their advice but placing it in this broader strategy framework," he told the Post.

In the wake of this diplomatic triumph, the Post editorialist fulminates that the U.S. needs to maintain 160,000 troops in that country to keep a military stranglehold over the world's declining and environmentally unsustainable oil resources. It's the same thinking that led Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor.